by Rosie Thomas
Conundrum was selling, and yet it didn’t sell.
Retailers ordered it in tens and twenties, instead of in hundreds. Harriet became an automaton, a machine that telephoned people she had never met, numbers and names one after another, disembodied voices, and talked sweetly to them, injecting a smile into her voice. She talked to everyone, anyone who might mention Conundrum, journalists in their columns, disc jockeys on their programmes, editors and assistants, assistants to assistants, all the way down the line to the school-leavers who made the tea. She talked to anyone at all, so long as there was the faintest chance that they might help her to produce some publicity. She could buy advertising space, and she spent on that as liberally as she dared, but it was much harder to get the gossipy little mentions, half news-items that were completely free except for her own efforts in securing them. Harriet began to understand, as she reviewed the orders, what she had only guessed at before. Only by generating the right kind of publicity could she create a buzz about Conundrum. It was harder still that she couldn’t even define her buzz except as a ripple in the ether that would wash people into the shops to buy the game.
It was April, and Conundrum was to be launched in August. She needed the pre-publicity now, the whisper in the air that would stimulate the buyers just enough to draw their attention. Without it, Conundrum would sink in a mass of other Christmas games. Harriet frowned and drew the telephone towards her again. Her ear ached from the pressure of the receiver against it. She dialled a number from one of her lists, asked for a name.
‘Cindy speaking.’
Harriet had spoken to Cindy before. She was a researcher at a commercial radio station in the north of England.
‘Hi, Cindy, how are you?’ The smile in the voice, imperative. ‘This is Harriet Peacock. You remember, I talked to you about Conundrum?’
‘Oh, right, hello.’ The sound of illusory friendship. ‘I talked to John, and he was really interested.’ John was the presenter of a self-consciously wacky music and chat programme. Harriet was trying to persuade Cindy to persuade John to play Conundrum on the programme, perhaps inviting some local celebrities in to play with him, or some nurses from the hospital, or the winners of the week’s phone-in quiz. Anyone, to do anything, so long as it was with Conundrum.
‘That’s great. When can he do it?’
‘Well actually, the thing is, John feels it’s a bit early for it yet.’
Harriet was also beginning to realise that it was invariably too early, or too late, or else the wrong season altogether. She doodled a face on her scrap pad as she listened, then scribbled an arrow piercing the skull.
‘He wondered if it would be better to do it around the launch date, you know, when the game is actually in the shops? When is the date, by the way?’
‘August. I’ll send you another press-kit. There’ll be a lot of interest in it then, Cindy. Press as well as radio. Feature it now, and people will have heard it from you first. I know John likes to be first.’ There was the delicate suggestion that, if somehow he failed to be, it would all be Cindy’s fault.
‘Oh, sure, I see that. Look, we’ve got the game here, all right? We’ll hold on to it, and put an item together nearer the time.’
‘That’ll be marvellous. I’ll come back to you.’ Admitting defeat, for now.
‘By the way, Harriet, there’s one thing I want to ask about it, and I’m sure John’ll say the same.’
‘What’s that, Cindy?’
‘Well, it’s just, where’s the story behind this? It’s a great game, right, but I’d like to know something else about it as well. Where do you come in? How did you invent it? Did the idea come to you in the bath, like eureka?’
Like hell, Harriet thought. But Cindy was right, curse her. Harriet had been aware that something was missing right back at the Toy Fair. The pristine backdrop and the rainbow boxes were bright, and they were also bland. The dark idea that nested in the back of Harriet’s mind raised its head again, and she pushed it forcefully away from her. Cindy was rattling on. She must be lonely, up there in her windowless little office in the boxy modern building on some windswept industrial estate. ‘Can’t you sell yourself a bit more? Are you a parachutist or an ex-nun, or anything? That would make a good one for us.’
Harriet laughed. ‘I must get a press release together. I’ll call it “All About Me”.’ She was even beginning to talk like these people, she thought bitterly, and it didn’t make her any more successful at selling to them. But this wasn’t selling. It was beginning to feel more like begging.
‘Thanks for the idea, Cindy. It’s been lovely to talk. ‘Bye now.’
Harriet made two more calls, and finished with two more open-ended assurances that there would be the right item, not to worry, when the time was right.
At last, she pushed her chair back in despair and stood up to stretch her stiff legs. The two-and-a-half offices that she had taken for Peacocks in a grubby Bayswater mews were silent. It wasn’t one of Graham Chandler’s days, and the typist-receptionist must be daydreaming behind her switchboard in the little front cubicle.
Harriet felt lonely and depressed. Her head was full of telephone voices, and yet there was no-one to talk to …
Stop it, Harriet commanded herself. There wasn’t any reason to be depressed. These were only obstacles besetting her now, not failures. And loneliness only attacked her when she wasn’t working, which was hardly ever.
She went to the dust-streaked window and looked down into the mews. She saw two or three parked cars, people passing by, and pigeons in a comical line on a window ledge. Harriet turned back to the lists on her desk, then dropped them impatiently and went through to the front office. As she had guessed, the typist was sitting staring blankly in front of her, her hands slack on the keys. She started into awareness several seconds too late. Harriet asked, not very mildly, if she didn’t have any work to do, and went on into the cramped washroom without waiting for an answer.
The office kitchen was a corner of the washroom, equipped with an electric kettle and a cold tap. Harriet poured water on to a tea-bag in a mug, too impatient to let the kettle boil. She took the resultant tepid brew back to her office and drank it, wincing at the assault by tannin.
When she went to the window again, she saw Robin Landwith getting out of his car. He had arranged their meeting for four forty-five, and when she looked at her watch she saw that he was punctual to the second. She also saw that he was driving a white Porsche.
Well, she told herself, he would be, wouldn’t he?
Robin paused briefly by the nameplate to one side of the street door. Peacocks, it announced in an austere typeface. Beside the name there was an engraved fan-shape, feathers of the bird’s tail, that Harriet had adopted as her company’s logo. Robin nodded, signifying approval. Harriet had style and good taste, whatever her other talents might prove to be.
He went briskly up the steep brown stairs and found Harriet’s typist pounding away as if trying to beat a speed record. The girl smiled at him from beneath her eyelashes, stopped typing, and buzzed through to Harriet.
‘Mr Landwith is here.’
The announcement was a formality that amused them both, as Harriet was separated from them only by a door so thin and warped that there were inch-wide gaps at top and bottom. Robin was smiling as he went in to her.
She looked up, and something sharpened in her face. She didn’t smile back at him.
‘Sit down, won’t you? It’s not very comfortable, I’m afraid.’
Robin took the second chair, too big for the small space. He glanced round at the wall-charts, the piles of paperwork on Harriet’s desk, the print-outs of sales data placed ready to hand. Conundrum boxes and boards made the only bright spots in the room. Robin also noticed that there were dark, puffy bags of skin under Harriet’s eyes. The two of them had met only twice, briefly and formally, since Landwiths had set her up in business. They had talked perhaps a dozen times on the telephone.
‘You seem w
ell established,’ he remarked.
Harriet didn’t even try to respond to his polite formula. The offices were horrible, she was well aware of that, because she had deliberately taken the cheapest possible. They would do, it would all do, for now.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to thank me, Harriet. I work for the company too. Shall we look at the figures?’
Harriet handed over the print-outs and a short covering report. She looked expressionlessly out of the window while Robin went through them. When he had finished his reading he asked the necessary questions and she answered succinctly.
There was a short silence and then Robin said, ‘Not good.’
‘No, not good,’ she echoed him.
Robin didn’t waste any time on laments. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’ve got two options. I can either keep plugging on as I am doing, and hope that things wiil pick up just before and following the game actually appearing on the market. Or I can stop everything now and make radical changes.’
He regarded her steadily. ‘So, which?’
Harriet felt slightly sick. The black idea had grown inside her, fed by Cindy. She didn’t want to admit to it, but at the same time it was powerfully attractive.
‘I need a little more time to think it out.’
Procrastination might bring a different, easier idea. Or Conundrum might start selling just as it was.
‘OK, good.’ To Harriet’s surprise Robin didn’t press her any further. With apparent relief he gathered up the print-outs and replaced them on the desk, put his gold-nibbed pen away in his inside pocket. Business was over. He leaned back, crossing ankle over knee to show an expanse of silk sock, and clasped his hands behind his head. He made a picture of relaxed good humour. Harriet felt a twitch of tiredness pulling at the corner of her eye.
‘And so, what now?’ Robin asked. She could see his father’s features very clearly, softer in the son.
‘Now, this minute do you mean?’ Harriet indicated the loaded desk, gave a faint shrug.
‘You look miserable.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘Let me try that again. I …’
‘Robin, don’t you want to discuss Peacocks any further?’
‘No, not now. It’s in your hands and I’m confident you’ll do whatever must be done.’
‘Thank you for your confidence.’ If only it were justified, Harriet thought. ‘And if I need additional funding?’ She would certainly need it, if she had to do what she feared.
‘Ask.’
He spread his hands, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. Harriet nodded, slowly. Lack of funds would be no excuse. She felt an invisible net closing around her, twisted automatically and uncomfortably on her hard chair.
Robin had put his fingers together. He tapped the end of his nose with the joined forefingers, studying her over the tips of them. He’s damned pompous, Harriet thought irritably, for not much more than a boy.
‘Stop work for this evening,’ Robin ordered. ‘Let me take you out to dinner.’
‘Thanks, but no.’
From the outer office came the sound of the receptionist putting on her coat and gathering up her plastic shopping bags. Harriet didn’t need to look at her watch. She knew it must be exactly half-past five. I must replace her as soon as I can, she resolved.
‘Please come. I’d like it very much if you would.’
Harriet had forgotten, for a split second, what he had been asking her. She was very tired. The momentary blankness must have shown in her face, because Robin stopped tapping his nose and stared harder at her.
‘Robin, I’m sorry. I’m not deliberately trying to be rude.’
‘I know you’re not. I’d like it very much if you’d let me take you out to dinner.’ He put no sarcastic emphasis on the repeated invitation, and spoke more softly than before. Harriet saw at once that he did want her company, and that he was concerned for her.
She felt a rush of exhausted self-pity. She could have dealt easily with accusations or aggression, or anything on a business footing. But direct sympathy was too much for her. Her eyes filled up with tears.
‘Harriet.’
Robin stood up and took a folded handkerchief out of his pocket. He put it on the corner of the desk and then went over to look out of the window with his back to her. Harriet blew her nose furiously. The boy was pompous, but he was also tactful.
Still turned away, Robin said, ‘If I don’t move my car soon, the owner of that garage over there is going to come home and find me blocking the doors.’
Harriet thought of sinking into the black leather seats of the white Porsche. She imagined the comfort of letting someone else make decisions for a whole evening. Somewhere in the inviting picture, too, was the prospect of a meal that would not involve a visit to the Belsize Park late-opening supermarket to see what the freezer cabinet would yield. She sniffed, and refolded the sullied handkerchief.
‘Thank you. I would like to come.’
‘Good.’ As soon as he had got what he wanted, Robin became brisk again. ‘Let’s go, then, shall we?’ He swept Harriet out of the dingy office and down into the mews.
The car wrapped her in its leathery embrace, exactly as she had imagined. It was pleasant to bowl down Park Lane, past the cold clumps of daffodils showing in Hyde Park. They shot between the buses and taxis. Robin was a slightly flashy driver, like Harriet herself. Harriet’s spirits lifted. London looked bright and busy, full of people going somewhere.
She wanted to brush aside her moment of weakness. ‘There’s been a lot of hard work just lately.’ A half-explanation. She didn’t want him to know that she was vulnerable to his kindness.
‘It doesn’t do to overwork,’ Robin answered. Lucky for you, if you don’t have to, Harriet thought. ‘Would you like to come home for a drink first, then we can go out to eat later?’
‘That sounds nice.’ Decisions, administrative ones at least, could be his for the evening. Harriet sat back and admired the performance of the Porsche.
If she had imagined where he lived she would have pictured a stiflingly-carpeted flat, perhaps in a mansion block in one of the gloomy streets behind Sloane Square. But Robin drove on over the river, where the strings of light were coming on against the dark trees of Battersea Park. He stopped the car in a pretty street lined with flowering cherry trees.
‘Is this your house?’
‘What did you expect?’
Harriet laughed. ‘I don’t know. Something different, not this.’
The two downstairs rooms had been knocked together, just like Jane’s. But the similarity went no further. There was only the best, here, in the most carefully understated way. There were big pale grey sofas and marble mantels to the pretty polished grates, polished parquet and, beside the French windows at the back of the room, a single serious piece of furniture. It was a Biedermeier secretaire with two dozen tiny, ivory-knobbed drawers. Harriet was involuntarily drawn to it, and she stroked the flat of her hand over the warm, smooth birchwood. She noticed that there was not even the finest film of dust. Everything in the room was very tidy and clean, no doubt kept in order by some faithful cleaning lady. Harriet imagined her partiality, ‘My young Mr Landwith, he’s a lovely boy,’ and almost laughed.
‘Pretty,’ she said, of the desk, to cover her amusement.
Robin was pleased. ‘I saw it in a catalogue and went to bid for it myself, so there was no chance of losing it. The interior decorators did most of the rest.’ He waved dismissively and Harriet saw that home for Robin was merely a place to live, necessarily as superior in appearance as the cut of his suits, and requiring about the same amount of emotional involvement. Robin had plainly chosen the right decorator. To put further energy into home-making would leave less to spare for making money, she supposed.
She felt the superiority of her own experience. She had made a home of her own already, and deconstructed it into packing cases
layered with knives, casserole dishes, coffee-pots and wedding china. Was it better to have done that much, she wondered, than to have done nothing at all?
And now at Belsize Park there was no time for home-making. The cases remained packed, containing the trappings of her marriage. But it wasn’t money for the sake of money that she was in pursuit of, Harriet distinguished for herself. It was success for Conundrum, and through it success for herself, and Simon.
The day’s concerns came back to her, but she dismissed them. She sank down into one of the grey sofas. There were even fresh flowers, she saw, arranged in a bowl beside the fireless hearth. Fires were messy, of course, and needed tending.
‘I don’t spend a lot of time here,’ Robin said, apparently following her thoughts.
‘I don’t see a lot of my home, just now, either,’ Harriet smiled at him.
‘It is possible to work too hard.’
‘Not in the position I’m in now. Next year, it’ll be different.’
He put a drink into her hand and they raised their glasses to each other in a silent propitiation of whatever demons might stalk the interval.
They had their drinks, and then another one apiece. When those were finished Robin said that he intended to take a shower before going out to dinner, and enquired politely whether Harriet might like one too.
She considered. She felt tired and grubby, and the idea of a hot shower was inviting. But to take off her clothes in Robin Landwith’s house, who although not an adversary was not yet quite a friend, wouldn’t that make her vulnerable again?
Harriet decided that she was being foolish. If she wanted a shower, she should take one. ‘Thank you,’ she said briskly.
He showed her upstairs. The pictures hanging up the staircase wall reminded her of the Landwith Associates offices. Perhaps they had bought a job lot somewhere. Robin’s bedroom, with a big bathroom opening through double doors beyond it, was decorator-masculine. There was plenty of solid mahogany, and some serious drapes, and framed photographs that seemed mainly to feature sports teams with crossed cricket bats or rugby balls on knees at centre-front. Everything was in impeccable taste, but Harriet felt irritated by the display of premature prosperity. Robin Landwith ought to be sharing a chaotic flat somewhere, with rock or political posters on the walls and a smell of unemptied pedal bin pervading the dense kitchen air. Leo had been living in just such a flat when she had first met him. She had begun by imposing a measure of hygiene on the kitchen, then they had moved on to live on their own together.